Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says

There is some small value but you can rectify that by working closer together over phone calls and such. It's not nearly worth what middle management says it's work to cover for their need to have everyone in the office to lord over, which is the 99% reason for it.

Even san francisco isn't that bad, only about 25% of office space isn't being use. It's not an apocalypse, these real estate people are just trying to declare "woe is me" because profits are down 10%

I suggest a large reasoning: why big&powerful seems to want people back in offices? IMO the primary reason is their own economic model.

Office means city. City means services. Services means profit for those who run them. If inflation keep going and there is not much space for the New Deal in cities, too dense to change, people get poorer, so try cheaper solution, meaning owning less, witch indirectly means using more services. Let's say some try to go to smaller apartments, then they have not much space for keep foods and cook at home, not much space to washing clothes at home, and that means services. No cars? Well, collective transportation service (improperly named public, since they are private companies in most of the cases) are there. They start to be toll free? Oh, someone pay, it does not matter if it's the transported human or the State. The point is that the SOLE way to realistically reach the famous "in 2030 you'll own nothing" is pushing people to total poverty and doing so without massive revolt means substituting what people loose with something else, services. In cities people can be impoverished while kept calm giving "aids" and services. Once their are trapped is just a matter of time to pushing services economical entry barrier a bit higher and de-facto imposing jobs people's can't refuse to earn enough to pay for all the services they need.

If WFH became the norm, in the western countries where tertiary sector is largely dominating other jobs many people would go out of the city, looking for large homes in nice places, homes large enough to have a personal office per adult, at least, so they have also space for cars, for fridge, kitchen etc and since perhaps they are in an area not so well serving they would prefer some redundancy and they learn how to repair stuff and so on => they would value their properties and they do want to posses, not to lease, not to externalize, less services. Owning means also have valuable assets, witch means an economic reserve that allow for life changes without being so tied to a 24/7/365 jobs and services, they be less blackmailable than someone who own nothing and spend anything in services. Such ownership also means people less keen to relocate, witch means less easy reorganization of the society following some ruling class will.

Then the rest. If the home will be the center of so many people lives, homeservers will be the norm, personal desktops as well, far less mobile devices and own hw means "hey, but it's cheaper than the cloud" and so a certain mentality shift also in the IT world toward a more decentralized computing, like we had in the past.

Then large real estate owners who loose big money and so on, essentially MOST large big capitals will loose points. A middle class can flourish again.

So? Well, they likely prefer pushing people in offices, allowing only some, the most skilled and useful, to be outside the smart city.

No proof, but IMVHO that's what happening today.

Your numbers may be outdated, San francisco is lower than my city coming in around 16 or 17% (i do not have the numbers in front of me atm).

The hard problem with % numbers is that they are usually made up on the fly, 62% of the time. However, in my case, I got the CRE vacancy numbers from NAI which is more credible than a random person on HN (no offense)

Was discussing the same with dad when walking through a nearly abandoned mall in MD a while ago. Think a sort of gated community - anchor stores can become things like WholeFoods. Reclaiming a ribbon of parking around the mall allows for creating a green zone around the mall and possibly even ‘backyard’ gardens. And as noted by others, it is far more trivial to add the necessary infrastructure to support housing. Natural light is another issue which can be addressed with minor alteration to the external facing walls of stores. Basically you can easily stamp out big studios, merge stores for n-bedrooms, and depending on the structure of the mall possibly even punch through floors for duplexes, etc. These will be luxury units. And the ‘food court’ etc. can form the core of the ‘village’.